President Obama on Tuesday defended a prisoner swap with the Taliban to free an American soldier, saying his “sacred” trust as commander-in-chief outweighed claims he broke the law and set a dangerous precedent.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Sunday that an operation to free soldier Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for Taliban prisoners was undertaken to save his life, as the insurgents’ leader hailed the swap as a “big victory.”

The Obama administration puts the cost of holding each of Guantanamo’s 171 prisoners at about $800,000 per year, or a total of $136 million taken from taxpayers’ pockets annually. That’s more than 30 times what it costs to keep an individual captive on U.S. soil. (more)

Two years after crossing an unmarked border into Iran, American hikers Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal are being released from prison on $1 million bail. Convicted of espionage by the Iranians, they had been sentenced to eight years behind bars. Update: The two Americans flew Wednesday to Oman, where they raced down the stairway of a private jet and into the arms of their families. (more)

At a time of record unemployment, American companies are increasingly exploiting the low-cost labor of 2.3 million Americans behind bars. This means fewer jobs available for free citizens, which leads to more unemployment, which produces more crime ... (more)

Hard manual labor is one time-honored method of putting prisoners to work, but Chinese jail bosses have caught on to another lucrative way to keep inmates occupied while lining their own pockets: online gaming.

On Thursday, 10 members of an alleged Russian spy ring pleaded guilty of espionage in a New York courtroom—a move which, as previous reports suggested, could lead to a prisoner swap between Russia and the U.S. Ah, Cold War nostalgia.

Six years after their release from the Guantánamo Bay prison, former inmates and British citizens Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul met up in London with an American soldier, Brandon Neely, who had been one of their guards during their two-year detention at Gitmo.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. government has decided that now is not the best time to transfer Yemeni detainees back to their homeland from Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. More than 80 Yemeni prisoners—almost half of the entire group at Gitmo—will stay put for the time being, as the situation between the U.S. and Yemen remains tense.

In December 2002, Mohammed Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade into a Jeep carrying U.S. troops and shipped off to Guantanamo Bay from Afghanistan. Jawad’s now home after seven years, and there’s a bit of a difference between his side of the story and the Pentagon’s—namely, he claims he was just 12 years old when he was arrested.

President Barack Obama dramatically changed course twice on May 13 when he announced he would not release photos of American military personnel “abusing” detainees, reversing the Pentagon’s statement on April 26 that it would comply with a court order—with the president’s own prompt and emphatic support for release.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama went back on his administration’s previous plan to release photos reportedly showing prisoner abuse at American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Team Obama may also follow in the Bushies’ footsteps by detaining some prisoners “on U.S. soil” and “indefinitely and without trial,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

He was one of three U.S. soldiers implicated in the execution-style shooting of four Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad in March 2007, but 40-year-old Army Master Sgt. John E. Hatley was also believed to have been the main instigator in the incident. On Thursday, Hatley was sentenced to life in prison for murder.

In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.

Patriotism and sacrifice for one’s country usually make for reliable go-to topics for politicians, but according to Talking Points Memo, John McCain’s detractors and admirers alike are starting to suggest that the Republican presidential hopeful and his campaign honchos dial it down a bit on the subject of McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Link TV’s Mosaic Intelligence Report is back with an in-depth look at the recent prisoner swap between Lebanon and Israel, comparing and contrasting how the leaders and people of both nations viewed the exchange and investigating what it might mean for Hezbollah and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in particular.

Yesterday [July 16] was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel’s folly and Hizbollah’s hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief.

Are we Americans truly savages or merely tone-deaf in matters of morality, and therefore more guilty of terminal indifference than venality? It’s a question demanding an answer in response to the publication of a 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture.

Ah, yes, those torture confessions have proved so useful. That, at least, was the claim of our president in justifying one of the most egregious assaults ever on this nation’s commitment to the rule of law. But now comes news that charges have been dropped against the so-called Sept. 11 attacks’ 20th hijacker, one of dozens so identified, because the “evidence” he supplied under torture and later recanted is not credible enough to go to trial.

Sen. John McCain has established himself as an outspoken critic of torture, which makes his vote Wednesday against the Feinstein Amendment, which would set limits on the types of interrogation techniques used by American intelligence agencies, all the more puzzling—or, in the case of The Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan, heartbreaking.

The House of Representatives and Senate have now both signaled their disapproval of the CIA’s use of waterboarding by voting for a ban on any techniques but the 19 officially approved by the Army, but President Bush has already, in turn, signaled his intent to veto any legislation that would rule out harsh interrogation methods.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and five other detainees at Guantanamo Bay are facing official charges from the Pentagon that could result in the death penalty.

The disgrace brought on the U.S. by members of the military who participated in the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison will likely linger for some time, but one of the key Army figures involved in the case, Lt. Col. Steven Jordan (pictured), has been cleared of any serious charges from the 2003 scandal.

Joining forces for a press conference at Camp David on Monday, President Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai refused the Taliban’s proposal for a prisoner swap. The Taliban says it will free the 21 surviving South Korean Christians kidnapped in Afghanistan on July 19 if captive Taliban members are released.

The commander of the Guantanamo detention center said the three detainees who killed themselves were “committed” and had carried out “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.” Rights groups, however, said the men were driven by despair.

Salon.com presents exclusive evidence that The New York Times incorrectly identified—in a Page 1 story!—the hooded detainee shown in one of the most iconic abuse photos from the notorious Iraqi prison. (Hat tip: Huff Po)

In a big story that is receiving scant media attention, the U.S. claims that Iraqi police forces are acting as “death squads” to wipe out Sunnis.
At the same time, the Iraq parliament is condemning the U.S. for the newly released pictures of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib.

Jill Caroll, 28, appears pleading and weeping in a newly released tape. | storyTruthdig says: Al Jazeera won’t let us hear Carroll’s voice because it would be too “upsetting” to viewers. CNN

CNN’s “The Situation Room” won’t even show a clip. What exactly is going on here? Why not let us, the viewers, decide what’s too “upsetting”? How is this any different from Bush’s censorship of coffins returning home from Iraq? We’ve watched jetliners packed with innocents crash into our Twin Towers. We’ve watched Iraqi civilians bombed in real time by our own forces. Since when did we become unable to judge for ourselves what we need to see to make sense of the world around us?